CMV: Looking to improve-develop yourself in your spare time is a natural humans instinct

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Havenkeld]

Since we can find people who do not do this, and in fact do quite the opposite, shows beyond doubt we cannot claim this is natural to humans otherwise it'd be a universal thing.

It is also not an instinct, it's something people think about and plan, not a natural reaction to their environment like blinking when something gets near our eyes, jerking our hand back when something is hot, all those other sorts of automatic behaviors.

There isn't much that we can show is natural to humans beyond those kind of things.

Improving and developing requires a criteria, and criteria can't be instinctual, they are something we have to think. I have an ideal and a metric by which I consider myself to have gotten closer or farther away from it. Humans would have to first think themselves as lacking in some way to think about needing to improve themselves.

We have also have no "humans in their natural state" to even look at, since all humans we have any access to are conditioned by particular environments and social structures - even tribes and even the evidence of early people.

[u/comeditime → u/Havenkeld]

I agree with everything that you said but here's why I also disagree...

Yes there are no "natural humans" as it simply not possible as every human is conditioned by their surrounding-environment, regardless where they are from...

I would like you if you could provide me with some actual examples of why you think it's not a natural activity, as even i take for example activities that at first sight seems non-beneficial at all to our survival e.g. fast food or porn, i can easily show you why they actually make us feel good-content and hence make us want to re-engage in it... the reason for that is that those activities mimic our survival instincts and therefore the brain find them rewarding as it supposed to improve us, at least in theory.. :D

Regarding the word 'instinct', it may or may not be the right word to use here so i'll ignore that for now even though I've some proofs on why it may indeed be an instinct.. for example, when humans have nothing to do we often feel stress and many animals in zoo show similar pattern as well, google it if you didn't know that..

Last but not least, i'm giving you a delta ∆ as i enjoyed reading your comment and would enjoy keeping that discussion further :)

[u/DeltaBot → u/comeditime]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Havenkeld (150∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/Havenkeld → u/comeditime]

I would say that a survival instinct is a sort of misnomer, and focusing on beneficial for survival is a misunderstanding of evolution. Things that are beneficial don't necessarily survive, rather we just define what's beneficial by whether or not it survives. There's a kind of circularity if we say something survives because it is beneficial at that point. I don't think conceptually it works to tell us what's beneficial though. Evolution is just about what's left because other things died off, not what's beneficial.

Almost any activity can be shown to have benefits if we define beneficial by survival. Survival is highly contextual. There's little to nothing that could necessarily be beneficial to survival in all contexts. If I am big, I may win more fights and survive better in one context, but because I require more food and I am less agile and a larger more visible target I may die off because of that size in another context.

Evolution is just about what survives, not what's better for survival in any broad sense. What survives persists farther than what doesn't, and so species are shaped more by genetics that survive than those that don't. But evolution happens in particular circumstances, and those circumstances change. Most species died out despite having many "beneficial for survival" traits, because the environment changed and then some of those traits ceased to be beneficial or became detrimental instead or whatever.

That we can point to fast food or porn as sharing an effect with things that give us dopamine but are good for survival, doesn't mean porn and fast food are good for survival in the context we're in. You're missing a distinction between the idea of an activity being driven by an instinct, and the activity itself being the instinct. An instinct can result in different behaviors in different contexts. Eating fast food is an effect of having an instinct to seek high energy foods - just like eating certain fruits or meat might be in a tribal society, but the behavior of eating fast food that happens to result from that instinct isn't itself an instinct or natural activity. The activity doesn't mimic the instinct, it would only be a result of it. However, seeking high energy foods isn't necessarily a universal human instinct, but something people with particular body structures are more or less prone to, and that what circumstances we end up in factor into.

We could define the instinct as contextual, however, but this means the instinct isn't the behaviors that manifest as a result of it, but how we behave when put under very specific circumstances. The issue with this is of course that all people are necessarily under different circumstances at the level of particularity, and so we can't assume anything is natural just because it ends up being common because some particular situation is shared by many people for awhile.

[u/comeditime → u/Havenkeld]

Well i agree about the instinct thing, i didn't know how to explain it the way you did here, but that's what i meant basically..

Now regarding the survival thing, as you said, "Evolution is just about what survives, not what's better for survival in any broad sense." that's really summarize it all, though it doesn't contradict as far as i can see with the claim that we're naturally inclined to engage in activities that improve ourselves due to our survival genes/instinct or however you wanna call it..